


A Piece of Preserved Ginger

by ariadnes_string



Category: Ripper Street, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Crossover, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-10 00:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times John Watson and Bennet Drake crossed paths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Piece of Preserved Ginger

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the h/c bingo April challenge: to write crossover fic for at least one of four given prompts. My prompts were burns, torture, motion sickness and accidental soul-bonding. All four made their way into the fic, though the soul-bonding is canonical and happens off stage.
> 
> I tried to fit the story around the canonical/historical dates of both fandoms. The chronology is given at the end of the fic. I apologize for any historical inaccuracy.
> 
> There are no spoilers for the Ritchie films, unless you are unfamiliar with their characterization of Watson. The story takes place before the first season of _Ripper Street_ , but there are spoilers for the back story revealed in 1x05 and 1x08.
> 
> Thanks to dogpoet for the beta!

**1878:**

Watson spent his first days aboard the troop transport _Eumaeus_ clinging to the aft rail. He recognized the irony of a doctor so seasick he couldn’t tend his patients, and only the ignominy of admitting that status kept him from retiring decisively to his cabin. Besides, the fresh air seemed to help.

He thought he’d found a secluded place to do his puking, tucked between the head and some bales of rope, but on the third day out he raised his head to find that someone had joined him. The man was a bit older than himself, sandy-haired and wiry—his army uniform new, but far too big for him. He seemed oblivious to Watson—oblivious to everything except the involuntary spasms of his own body. 

When the man finished offering up his army rations to Thetis, he spat. Then he began to curse the ship and the ocean it sailed upon in colourful and comprehensive detail. “Me mam was right,” he concluded. “Ain’t no good in this world out of sight of St. Mary’s.”

The grime of London was so thick in the man’s voice Watson could practically see it. The sound settled his stomach wonderfully.

“A wise woman, your mother,” he said. 

The man registered Watson’s presence—along with his considerably less grimy accent—with a start. He pushed himself away from the rail and into some approximation of parade rest, hands behind his back and chin up. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he spluttered. “I meant no disrespect. It was just you was in your shirtsleeves and I didn’t—“

“No pardon to give, soldier—we are both _in extremis_ here.” Watson interrupted him. “And besides, I’m a doctor, not an officer.” Though of course he was both, even if he hadn’t quite figured out what that meant yet. “Dr. John Watson, at your service.”

It did the trick. The man relaxed. Or perhaps he simply didn’t have the strength to hold himself upright any longer. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and sagged against the rail. “Much obliged, Dr. Watson. Private Bennet Drake.” Something occurred to him. “Doctor, eh? You got anything that’ll cure this?”

Watson shook his head ruefully. “If I did, I would’ve dosed myself. They say it passes as one gets used to the motion of the ship.”

Drake’s face revealed his opinion of that theory. But then Watson remembered something. He dug into the pocket of his trousers, pulled out a crushed wax-paper packet, and held it out to Drake. “Try one of these. My brother gave me them before we sailed: preserved ginger. He swore by it for seasickness.”

Cautiously, Drake took the packet and shook one of the amber-coloured morsels into his hand. “Oh,” he said, when he’d chewed and swallowed it. “That’s lovely, that is. Nicest thing I’ve had in—well, since I can’t remember when.”

He gazed at Watson with watery, grateful eyes. They were a pale, greenish shade of blue—almost the colour of the sea around them when the light hit it—and seemed capable of a depth of feeling not otherwise evident in the hard, flat planes of his face.

“Keep them,” Watson said, embarrassed that such a tiny thing could produce such an effect. What lives of deprivation most common soldiers led. “They’re not doing me any good.”

Drake bobbed his head with a mumbled, “Much obliged, sir, in your debt.” He tucked the packet into his pocket and rubbed at his eyes with a fist. “Where’re you bound, then, Dr. Watson?” he asked, when he’d collected himself.

“India. The Northwest Provinces. Yourself?”

“The Sudan.”

Watson frowned. “A dangerous posting these days; I hear the Madhis are making a good deal of trouble for Governor Gordon.” 

He wondered how Drake would fare in battle. He’d wondered the same thing of all the raw recruits on the transport. He’d wondered it of himself. Seasickness aside, Drake seemed as hale and hearty as the best of of them, but Watson sensed no particular violence in him. Perhaps it lay below the surface. Perhaps it did for all men. But then there were those eyes. 

“Africa can’t be worse than this bloody ship,” Drake said. 

And suddenly, as if in retaliation for the insult, the deck pitched sharply, sending them both back to clinging to the rail.

It was the only time they spoke during the voyage.

**1885**

“Not the hands,” Watson croaked, as the bigger of the two men pushed him into the back room of the club. 

The man had a hard grip on the back of his neck, so the words were somewhat strangled, but Faraday seemed to understand him well enough.

“I should break all ten of your fingers, and your toes besides, for the amount you owe me,” he said. He gestured with his cigar, and his thugs, understanding the wordless command, started to tie Watson to the wooden chair in the middle of the room. “But I suppose I should leave you some way to make back your debt. Goodness knows you’ll never do it playing cards.”

Watson felt hot shame well up under the sluggish cool of drink. Four years—four years living with Sherlock Holmes and keeping to the straight and narrow and yet here he was again: markers coming due that he couldn’t begin to pay, and the gambling fever so high in him he’d ventured out tonight despite knowing Faraday would want to take it out of him in blood. Self-loathing sat toad-like on his chest, and he almost longed for Faraday to cut it away.

What had brought him to this place? Holmes would have said it was the newspaper’s salacious reporting of the Fall of Khartoum—Watson could almost hear him saying it, with his characteristic cock of the head, half compassionate, half curious. But Holmes would’ve been wrong. Watson had barely glanced at the print columns devoted to the battle, had refused to dwell on the gory illustrations. Indeed, he’d barely been at Baker Street long enough to read the society pages these last few weeks.

He’d been gambling instead.

“A few more days?” he said to Faraday, hating the pleading note in his own voice. “A week?”

“Shut up,” said the smaller thug, and cuffed him hard on the back of his head with his own cane.

Faraday ignored the interruption. “Well,” he said, circling the chair. “If it’s not to be the hands, where shall we leave our little lessons about the importance of paying one’s debts?” Watson tried to follow him with his eyes, but the room swam when he tilted his head. “The face? It would be a shame to spoil his looks, though, wouldn’t it, boys?”

The boys—both forty if they were a day—grunted their agreement in the most bloodthirsty of registers.

“What’re you waiting for, then?” asked Faraday. “Strip him to the waist.”

The boys did so with dispatch, ripping away his waistcoat ( _ooo, nice_ , said one, fingering the brocade) and popping the buttons on his shirt like walnut shells.

“That’s better.” Faraday was a tall man, and he had to bend far over to get his face close to Watson. His teeth were yellow and crooked in his thin-lipped mouth. “Now we’ll see if we can motivate you to pay me back.”

With an inevitability that should’ve been obvious to Watson the moment he’d entered the room, Faraday took the cigar from his mouth, regarded its glowing tip for a moment, and then ground it deliberately into Watson’s collarbone.

The pain was hideous—the skin was thin there, so near his throat—but it had the virtue of dispersing the fog of self-loathing in which Watson had been wandering. He allowed himself a proper yell of protest, hoping it would distract his torturers from his simultaneous testing of the ropes binding him. The ones around his hands seemed loose: the boys were no geniuses with twine. 

Faraday appeared pleased with his work. “That’s got your attention, eh? How ‘bout another one, then, for good measure?”

But before his cigar could reach Watson’s flesh a second time, the larger thug said, “Boss, you hear that?”

Faraday paused to listen. And then Watson could hear it, too, even over the ringing in his ears: the increased tumult in the club, the cries of “bloody coppers,” and “I’m nicked,” and “run!” 

“Fuckin’ hell,” said Faraday, just as someone kicked the door open and three figures burst into the room. 

Two of the figures wore the neatly buttoned uniforms of bobbies. The third wore a houndstooth suit and a face out of a dream: fine blue eyes above cheeks whose neat fringe of beard did nothing to mask the web of deep-scored lines.

But before Watson could place his memory of that face, general chaos broke out in the small space. Faraday and his boys rushed the police, who set upon them with their batons. Watson wrenched his hands free and wrestled with the ropes around his ankles. Before he could untie himself, however, Faraday, as if it were somehow Watson’s fault the club had been raided, dealt him another blow with his cane, and everything descended into darkness.

+++

The next thing Watson was aware of was someone probing the lumps on his head. It hurt. He tried to bat away the offending fingers, but his arms were clumsy and heavy.

“Stay still,” said an oddly-accented voice—American?—“I’m a doctor.”

“Bully for you,” said Watson. “That makes two of us.” 

He opened his eyes—and immediately wished he hadn’t. There was no mistaking the jail cell surrounding him, or its rank odor of men sweating off the excesses of the night. 

He was sitting, still shirtless, propped against a dank stone wall. A pale man with dark whiskers and tartan trousers crouched in front of him.

“Good,” said the man, peeling back Watson’s eyelids with an expert, if ungentle, hand. “No slurring of speech. You’re not as concussed as I expected. Captain Homer Jackson, Surgeon, US Army, pleased to meet you.”

Watson was confused. The Met’s hospitality did not usually extend to medical attention, except in the most dire cases.

“No,” said Jackson, intuiting his puzzlement. “Nicked, same as you. Seems we share a vice as well as a profession.”

Watson snorted, though it hurt his head. “John Watson, Royal Medical Corps, retired—much obliged.”

“Well, Dr. Watson, I assume I don’t have to tell you to take good care of that once you get out.” He gestured at the burn on Watson’s collarbone. Now that Watson was awake, it was starting to throb. “Things will fester like motherfuckers, you don’t look out.” His fingers strayed to the puckered, ugly scar on Watson’s shoulder. “How’d you come by this, if you don’t mind my asking?” 

Watson did mind—the man seemed as profligate with personal remarks as every American he’d ever met. “By way of a bullet, how do you think?” He almost regretted his discourtesy, but not quite.

Jackson, however, did not take offense. “One that could’ve had your name on it, by the looks of it. Took a Sioux arrow to the shoulder myself once, but it healed a damn sight better than that.”

The last thing Watson wanted to do was swap war stories. He was mustering the energy to tell the intrusive Captain Jackson to shove off when a key rattled in the cell door.

 _Holmes_ , Watson thought, _At last._

But it wasn’t. It was the same man from the night before—the one with the eerily familiar face—and it was Jackson’s name he was calling. 

“Oi,” said the man. “Step lively; your lady love’s come to spring you. Though what she sees in you, I’ll never know.”

From his vantage point on the floor, all Watson could make out of Jackson’s rescuer was a slim figure in a resplendence of blue satin, but judging by the frank appraisals by prisoners with better views, she was a jailbird’s dream come true.

Jackson, at least, seemed pleased. He sprang to his feet, pointed a finger at Watson and said, “Stay away from the cards, pal, doctor’s orders,” doffed his hat mockingly to the rest of their cellmates, and was gone.

The policeman lingered, and then seemed to make a decision. “You too,” he said and hauled Watson to his feet.

Perhaps it was the sudden movement, or perhaps it was Jackson dragging the army to the forefront of Watson’s mind, but the policeman’s face finally slotted into place.

“The _Eumaeus_ , wasn’t it?” he said, still amazed at the coincidence. “You were seasick?”

“No worse than you,” the man replied, his hand firm on Watson’s bicep as he led him out of the cell. “But you was kind to me when many wasn’t. I’ve always remembered that.”

+++

Drake—that was the man’s name, Sergeant Drake, now—took Watson to what must have been his Governor’s private washroom. After the noxious cell, the tiny space was a heaven of cleanliness and quiet.

“Back in a tick,” Drake said, and so he was, carrying a basin of water, a worn flannel, a shirt borrowed off someone called Atherton, and, most remarkably, Watson’s cane.

“Thought this might be yours,” he said. “Knew it couldn’t belong that arsewipe Faraday.”

Watson was glad to see it; his leg was now aching in concert with his head and shoulder. “Limp courtesy of Maiwand. Bout of Enteric fever after, and that was me done for.” Drake hadn’t asked—wouldn’t ask—but it seemed right somehow that he should know.

Drake nodded. “It was El Teb did for me. Looks like the Empire spat us both back onto these green and pleasant shores a bit the worse for wear.”

Watson tried to discern the source of the note of bitterness in Drake’s voice. He bore no visible scars, but who knew what damage he’d sustained. Watson remembered wondering, during their journey on the _Eumaeus_ , how each man would face the test of battle, as if it were a school exam. He knew better now, of course, but a queer nostalgia for that naivete pricked at him. In a sudden fury, he splashed water from the basin on his face to disguise his welling eyes. 

“Been sick for weeks about Khartoum, I have,” Drake went on, quiet and matter-of-fact. “I’ve got mates there still. Don’t know what’s become of them, poor lads.”

Watson could think of no reply to that, nor would he have trusted his voice to speak one. But Drake seemed content to watch silently as Watson tried to remove the previous night’s blood and grime. His eyes had grown paler with age, Watson thought, almost translucent under heavy lids. Unreadable. 

Watson let out a sharp, involuntary gasp as his hand slipped and the flannel touched the burn on his collarbone.

“Sometimes it hurts like blazes,” said Drake, though whether he was referring to physical pain or something else Watson would never know.

For just then Holmes’s inimitable, longed-for voice rang out in the station’s foyer. “There has been some mistake,” he was saying, sharp and confident. “Dr. Watson was carrying out an investigative mission for me in that den of iniquity, not gambling. I am a consulting detective, you know.”

**1888**

Watson was just leaving the hospital, rounds completed, when news of the ferry disaster came in. He turned on his heel and went back through the doors, waiting with the other doctors for the inevitable casualties.

There were more even than they’d expected, many serious, for the ferry had been packed to the gills when it went down. It was nearly midnight when Watson tried again to head towards home.

As he left the men’s ward, however, a trick of the light caught a familiar figure sitting in hard-backed chair next to an occupied bed.

“Sergeant Drake?” 

“Dr. Watson.” Drake stood. He did not smile, but something lightened in his expression as he shook Watson’s hand.

“I am glad to see you again,” Watson said. “But sorry it should be here.” He had crossed paths with Drake a few times since his brief incarceration at Leman Street, when Holmes’s investigations had intersected with H Division inquiries. Their interactions had been cordial and businesslike—none of the raw emotion of those first two occasions. “A family member…?”

“My guv’nor.” Drake looked towards the still body in the bed, his face darkening again. “He was on that ferry that went down.”

Watson grimaced sympathetically. He took the chart clipped to the bottom of the bed and started to read through it. Edmund Reid: he knew that name, had seen it in the newspaper reports of the Ripper investigations. Reid’s injuries were serious—third degree burns across his left shoulder and down his back—but not necessarily life threatening.

“He should recover well enough, if they can stave off infection,” he told Drake, who had been watching Watson’s perusal of the chart anxiously. “Still, his family should be informed, if he has any.”

“His wife—she was took ill herself, when she heard the news.” Drake hesitated, began again. “Their daughter, see—well, she was on that ferry, too. She ain’t been found. Ain’t been found yet,” he amended loyally.

A tragedy then. “I hope they find her soon,” Watson said, though he knew the survivors had ceased coming in hours before.

Drake nodded his thanks. “I thought I’d sit with him a while. Since there’s no one else.”

There was perhaps six inches space between them, but Watson could feel the tension in Drake’s body as if it were his own. It coiled itself around him like a living thing, kept him pinned there at the foot of Reid’s bed.

“May I show you something, doctor?” Drake said, after a moment or two, his voice low, but strained. He started rolling up his shirt sleeve without waiting for an answer. Watson watched him, almost afraid of what would be revealed. “Do you know her?” Drake asked, when the elaborate tattoo on his forearm came into view. Watson shook his head, wary. “The Egyptian goddess of war, she is.” Drake’s gaze lay neither on the tattoo, nor on Watson, but rather on Reid’s unmoving form. The dim light of the ward rendered his pale eyes uncanny, as transparent as glass. “I did things in that country. Things I believed had burned my soul as black as pitch. But one of their holy men, he put those marks upon my skin, and told me I was consecrated to the goddess now; and even as she had turned from destruction to love, so should I.” 

Watson nodded in understanding. In the army hospitals of India he had met men who had done such things and worse to repair the wreckage war had wrought on their bodies and their minds.

“And was he right, your holy man?” he asked.

“On the whole, I believe he was. But on nights like tonight— When I think of Inspector Reid’s little girl. Of the Ripper still walking bold among us. Nights like this, I feel the goddess stirring, in all her awful power.” 

Watson could sense her too, charging the air around them with immanent violence. He reached out and gripped Drake’s shoulder, though whether in solidarity or caution, he did not know; Drake's flesh was as unyielding as stone. 

Watson was exhausted; he’d been on his feet twelve hours and more. He thought longingly of the hearth at Baker Street, Holmes surely awake, and deep in some problem, papers strewn around him and wreaths of pipe smoke around his head. But he could not leave Drake here, at the mercy of his goddess.

“I’ll stay with you a bit, shall I?” he asked. “If you don’t mind? In case Inspector Reid needs anything.”

Reid wouldn’t, Watson was fairly sure. He lay on his stomach in a drugged sleep, tiny spasms of pain darting across his slack face, oblivious of his sergeant’s distress. If he were lucky, he would stay in that blessed state of unconsciousness for a long time yet. 

But Drake, at least, seemed to appreciate the lie. “I’d take that very kindly, sir,” he said, and Watson thought he could see the iron rigidity leaving his body. As if glad you have something practical to do, he insisted Watson take his chair, and fetched an even less comfortable looking stool for himself.

They sat in silence for a while, the ward murmuring around them: grunts and stifled groans, the shushing of loved ones and the Sisters’ almost silent feet as they made their rounds.

“I’ve enjoyed reading your stories, doctor,” Drake said after a while, able to strike a conversational tone again. “Your Mr. Sherlock Holmes is quite the fellow. Though I believe Inspector Reid could give him a run for his money.” 

“He’s a good governor to you, then?” Watson asked—it seemed important suddenly.

“Oh, yes. He has his ways, of course. And he can be a harsh taskmaster. But he’s a fair ‘un. And he has a pure and holy love of truth. I am lucky in my employment.”

“I am glad of that, Sergeant Drake,” Watson said, thinking he could say much the same for himself.

**Author's Note:**

> 18776-7: Great Sioux Wars (Battle of Little Big Horn, 1776).  
> 1878: Watson sails for India  
> 1880: Battle of Maiwand  
> 1881: Holmes and Watson meet.  
> 1884: First and Second Battles of El Teb  
> 1885: Khartoum falls.  
> 1888: The Ripper murders
> 
> nb: it is only my head canon that Jackson served in the Sioux Wars, but the dates fit.


End file.
